RESOURCES
17 Dec 2018
A Year in Review - Ensuring Your Business Efficiency and Compliance (Part 1)
As we count down the days to a brand new year and begin our planning for 2019, it seems timely to take a step back and look at how far Biz4x has progressed in the last 12 months, over a total of 12 releases. Updates to Biz4x in 2018 have continued to be focused on increasing your operational efficiency and ensuring that your business remains compliant with the global trend towards increasingly stringent anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regulation. In part 1 of this two-part series, we will summarise all the product updates in 2018, most of which revolve around ensuring your business is efficient and compliant - the basic tenets of running a successful enterprise. Part 2 of this series will give you a sneak peek into the crystal ball regarding our future plans to help your business remain relevant in 2019. As with last year, we've made great strides in 2018, from improving current features to launching new innovations - the most anticipated and successful of which was the Biz4x Wholesale Marketplace.
Wholesale Marketplace
Based on a Request for Quote model, the Biz4x Wholesale Marketplace was the realisation of our vision for the digital transformation of banknotes trading among money services businesses and wholesalers. The buying and selling of banknotes has always been a mostly manual process, without detailed records for accountability and auditing for compliance, or a proper space to trade with a large group of peers. In creating the Biz4x Wholesale Marketplace, we have formalized the wholesale trading process and made it more efficient through technology, to modernise and bring it into the 21st century through a SaaS-enabled wholesale marketplace.
Trading elements and concepts we introduced in the Wholesale Marketplace include the following:
- Request for Quotes - The initial order placed by money services businesses in the buying or selling of a currency that includes all order details. Multiple currencies can be requested in a single RFQ.
- Bidding Period - The amount of time that an RFQ can be quoted on with the maximum amount of time being 30 minutes.
- Quote - The response that wholesale marketplace participants can send in to an RFQ which includes amount and type of currency.
- Quote Validity - The amount of time which your quote is valid for with the maximum amount of time being the length of an RFQ's bidding period.
- Anonymity - The option for wholesale marketplace participants to choose whether or not to disclose their identities initially. All details are made known when an order is successfully placed and accepted.
- Groups - The ability to group money service businesses into various groups, that can be used to filter, white list or black list businesses you want to trade with.
- Denominations - The option to request only certain denominations of the currencies you wish to trade in.
- Partial Fulfillment - The ability to quote for only part of the specified amount in the RFQ.
- Requested Rate - A rate that senders of an RFQ can request for.
As part of the Biz4x Wholesale Marketplace launch, we held our first ever event for money services businesses in Singapore to gather feedback about the wholesale marketplace, and we look forward to organising more of such events in 2019! We'll be looking to emulate our successful launch in Singapore this year to other regions, so look out for news of the Biz4x Wholesale Marketplace coming to your region soon.
Your Rates
We've made it more convenient to refresh and update your rates with our rate validation functionality. Rate validation allows you to pre-set parameters within which your rates can be adjusted. If the rates are manually adjusted and rate validation fails for some rates (rates are set outside of the allowed parameters), the system will display an error message that shows which rates have the error. You can also specify a default profit margin (in percentage). This allows you to update all your rates to the default profit margin you have set at a single go through the default button. With rate validation, the updating of rates is a simple and convenient process.
Aside from displaying retail Buy and Sell rates on your rateboards, we've added the ability to include a Telegraphic Transfer, or Send rate to your board. As with Buy and Sell rates, Send rates can be assigned to a default profit margin, and thus conveniently updated.
Transactions
We've released a dedicated interface that is optimized for recording transactions, where you can see stock cost rate, a transaction summary of past customer activity and choose between different receipt formats for print. The dedicated interface for transactions will serve as the foundation for many improvements to Business Management in the year ahead. When you need to process many transactions from walk-in customers rapidly however, you can still use the New Transaction wizard on the dashboard for quick input of basic customer details.
Compliance
In line with regulatory authorities pushing for more stringent compliance standards in the financial industry globally, we've built a highly flexible system for money services businesses to enforce their own compliance policy. With Policy Enforcement, they can create a risk profile for customers that might require enhanced due diligence (such as declaring source of funds or purpose of transactions), set up risk scoring based on factors related to transactions (amount or purpose) or customers (nationality or frequency) to categorise transactions into low, medium or high risk groups, and finally determine enforcement actions to be taken thus covering the entire process of robust detection, rapid escalation and effective resolution through a risk assessment approach.
Regulatory Reports
Aside from just regulatory reporting for Singapore and Malaysia, we have added the Hong Kong Statement of Transactions to our list of reports. As has always been our policy, we will continually add more automated reports and support reporting for more territories in the region in the new year to come.
A new Risk Based Assessment report aggregates all low, medium and high risk transactions across all outlets.
Design
As we continually add new features to Biz4x, it has become necessary to revise the menu to account for brand new features and modules such as with Wholesale Trading. Consequently, we have released a new set of icons to reflect new features and new terminology, together with a reorganised menu structure for ease of use and navigation. You will see more of such visual improvements in 2019 as we continue to optimise Biz4x's user interface.
We've just launched a brand new website to provide better content with a brand refresh that features the consistent use of the above mentioned new icons across both web and app interfaces. Much like the app, the new website has an extensible structure to cater to new features and markets with product and solution-specific pages. You'll find forward-looking features, as well as a searchable support section with over 70 new articles to help you make the most of your Biz4x subscription.
Mobile App
The Biz4x mobile app has also received some love from us this year. Our first version of the Biz4x mobile app only allowed for the monitoring and management of live FX rates or market data. This year, we've released a new version on Android and iOS that allows for the management of Buy and Sell retail rates on Get4x and the rateboard. Shortly after, another release included the ability to accept and manage currency bookings from travellers.
It's been a busy year of progress for us, and we're looking forward to another amazing 12 months ahead. We are pleased to see that Biz4x is finding favour among professional services, fintechs and even banks. In part two of this series, we'll discuss some of the exciting new digital projects we will soon be embarking on - we'd like to invite you to be a part of that journey, so watch this space for more details on 2019's digitalization projects!
